Application Brief: Property & Casualty Insurance
Major Insurance Company improves communications with customers, increases field underwriters’
productivity and reduces costs with Biscom’s fax-hosting service
“It’s saved us time and money and it was completely painless to set up. The vice president of sales asked
‘Why didn’t we do this before?’”
Profile: Property & Casualty Insurance Company
For over 75 years this company has specialized in providing property and casualty insurance to contractors. The company
also provides government-mandated ERISA bonds to pension plan managers. They also provide fiduciary liability
protection in case of lawsuits. These products are sold via resellers and a direct sales force of final underwriters to all 50
U.S. states.
The Problem
The insurance company deals with a large number of
documents that are sent to and from their customer base.
These documents include insurance and bond applications
as well as credit reviews and other financial information.
For security reasons and due to increasing volumes of
spam emails, many customers prefer not to do business via
email but rather prefer fax. While the company is happy to accommodate them, this results in additional expenses for
fixed phone lines, fax machines, paper and toner.
The problem becomes more serious when a mix of fax
and email contacts is applied to the way the company
does business. In many cases, automatic systems send
out mass-emails to multiple customers to remind them of
payments due or provide required financial information.
Customers with only a fax number could not receive these
messages automatically. Instead, a separate document had
to be prepared and manually faxed to a more specific fax
customer list – an inefficient process. More importantly, the
field underwriters were unable to contact these customers
as they were seldom in the office. Colonial Surety needed a
simple and effective way to combine both fax and email so
that anyone could send or receive faxes at their desktop, no
matter where they were.
The Solution
FAXCOM Anywhere turned out to be the perfect solution
to the insurance company’s problem. A hosted version
of Biscom’s award-winning FAXCOM solution, FAXCOM
Anywhere provides a simple desktop faxing solution that
lets users send and receive faxes from their email systems.
“We’re getting phenomenal feedback
from our employees – especially
for the toll-free numbers...FAXCOM
Anywhere is easy to use...”
The sender simply composes an email, adds any documents
that are required and addresses it to the customer ’s
fax number. Biscom’s fax hosted service receives the
email, handles all aspects of the fax transmission (retries,
interrupts, etc.) and sends a fax status report right back
to the originator. Received faxes are even simpler: each
user has a personalized fax number (local or toll-free)
and receives faxes sent to that number as emails with a
searchable PDF attachment containing the faxed document.
The insurance company is now able to handle fax documents electronically as easily as they handle email. Their
automatic systems can now seamlessly send information to both fax and email recipients without any human
intervention. As well, they have realized significant cost savings by eliminating their fax machines and the associated
toner, paper and maintenance costs. Even more importantly, they reduced fixed phone lines and their recurring monthly
costs. FAXCOM Anywhere supports an unlimited number of fax numbers (so there’s never a busy signal) and the
company now pays only for the faxes they send and receive. That’s currently between 150 to 500 pages each day and
growing!
Employees have already seen a dramatic improvement. “We’re getting phenomenal feedback from our employees– especially for the toll-free numbers,” said one user. “FAXCOM Anywhere is easy to use for our field underwriters and the online user management system makes adding new users simple. When we hire new field underwriters or change their responsibilities, I just have to go to a website and enter their names – I can even keep the existing phone numbers if I need to!”
Installation was simple and required no additional software. Biscom’s legendary direct customer service made the transition almost invisible and the insurance company had field underwriters sending and receiving faxes from all over the U.S. within hours.
Biscom Inc.
Biscom was founded in 1986 and pioneered the fax server marketplace,
providing many of the world’s largest organizations with its award-winning
FAXCOM fax servers. In addition to enterprise fax server products, Biscom
also offers hosted fax services, secure file transfer and messaging solutions,
file conversion software, and document workflow and automation tools.
Biscom is headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.
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